CWRU students take home first place at the seventh annual Autonomous Snowplow Competition

Students from Case Western Reserve University took home first place at the seventh annual Autonomous Snowplow Competition in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Hosted by the North Start Section of the Institute of Navigation Satellite Division, the competition challenges students to design, build and operate a fully autonomous snowplow to remove snow from a designated path, while safely avoiding moving and stationary obstacles.

Matthew Klein, William Baskin, Charles Hart and their robot OTTO-XL surpassed last year’s second-place finish to bring home the Golden Snowglobe, $7,000 in cash and a $3,000 travel stipend to present at the 2017 ION GNSS+ Conference in September. They also won the Golden Shovel Award for best student presentation, which included another $500.

OTTO-XL and the rest of the competition were featured in a recent mini-documentary and an article from Vice’s Motherboard (see below).